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Demographic ageing in Europe is leading to an increasing need for care and a serious challenge for the sustainability of our social and healthcare systems. Informal carers across the EU currently provide over 80 per cent of all care. If not adequately supported, caring can have many difficult consequences for carers. Carers should not be socially and economically penalised as a result of their caregiving activities. Measures designed to support them should therefore aim to recognise them and their vital role in society, provide them with the essential information and counselling they need, give them access to allowances that offset the costs they face and truly values their contribution, develop flexible working arrangements and care leave schemes to allow them to maintain an active life, and improve the provision of equitable and accessible formal care services to ensure carers can rely on professional alternatives to informal care. This policy paper makes clear why it is necessary to address the challenges faced by young carers. It briefly discusses different forms of support measures and makes recommendations for better support for Young Carers

The freshman research paper can be a labor for both the teacher and the student with its many layers of skills and expectations. While academia has moved beyond note cards and simplified documentation models, students continue to get lost in the research process, often to the point that instructors may even wonder if they had been teaching in an alternate reality once they begin grading the finished products. As a dual enrollment instructor for Virginia Western Community College (VWCC) and Botetourt County Public Schools for the past eight years, the author has struggled to make the research process more appealing to her students so that their investment in their final papers is greater and yields more success. Typically educators see the research process as an individual and isolating experience where no one shares ideas or sources to avoid plagiarism. The truth is that students freely share ideas and sources and have become adept at hiding their collaboration from instructors. An interdisciplinary English composition/political science course used inquiry-based learning, technology, collaboration, and a real-world problem to engage students in a memorable project. The author reports that this approach reduces plagiarism, increases the students' research and writing skills as well as their interest, and decreases her workload.

After 9/11, the academic study of terrorism flourished as more government resources were focused on counterterrorism efforts. As the focus slowly shifted towards P/CVE or Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, more and more articles lauded the potential benefits of including Formers. The idea behind that was that experience equals expertise. Formers have been valuable data sources as research participants. However, the current trend has seen Formers leave that role and take on far more complicated and sophisticated roles, such as deradicalization experts, claiming to help people leave extremism. This policy paper focuses on the evidence, specifically the lack of evidence, to support the prevailing assumptions regarding the effectiveness of Formers and dissects the ethical issues arising from their involvement in P/CVE. The paper ends with policy recommendations to shift P/CVE activities and research toward a more empirically-grounded model. Since P/CVE initiatives involve a variety of actors, from academic researchers to the media to practitioners, this paper is not aimed at one field or profession. Rather, it is intended for everyone involved in P/CVE-related activities, including research.

The Panama Papers disclosures in April 2016 revealed information about tax avoidance and fraud among political elites and the wealthy on a global scale. But did the disclosures affect relevant political attitudes and behavior, including perceptions of corruption, redistributive preferences, and voting intentions? We leverage nationally representative surveys that were in the field at the time in two heavily impacted countries, France and Spain, and treat the disclosures as a natural experiment, comparing respondents questioned just before and just after the disclosures. Our design highlights the difficulty, at times, of interpreting natural experiments, given the potentially compounded treatments that arise as events unfold over time, and the common inability to properly determine views prior to the treatment. That said, the analysis indicates that the disclosures had limited effects on the domains most likely affected by such a scandal, consistent with them being interpreted based on existing beliefs and identities. Our results thus contradict prior findings which suggest that the Panama Papers had substantial effects on redistributive attitudes, and shed further light on voters’ learning and updating around uncertain, yet emotionally laden, political facts.

Over the course of less than a quarter of a century, two Brazilian Heads of State – Fernando Collor in 1992 and Dilma Rousseff in 2016 – have been removed from office by impeachment. There has been much controversy surrounding both proceedings, particularly the latter. The article seeks to discuss briefly the history of the proceeding of impeachment in Brazil and its significance for the country’s political life after 1988. Through an analysis of the impeachment cases of President Fernando Collor and President Dilma Rousseff, and overview of the literature on impeachment in Latin America, the paper will address the similarities and differences present in both cases in which a Brazilian Head of State was removed from office. The last part of the article will further discuss the disputes among Brazilian jurists triggered by differing evaluations of this legal measure and, in particular, the more recent case of its implementation in Brazil.

Words should be chosen and used carefully so that they convey the meaning or meanings that you intend--and do not convey any unintended or double meanings. Writing should leave little ambiguity or uncertainty about what you are referring to--unless some purposeful ambiguity is desired. Sometimes words that are abstract or superficial may be chosen to suit the writer's purpose. For example, there is a long tradition of euphemistic writing. But such use of words should be well-considered and deliberate, not the result of carelessness or indifference.

The EU Member States are characterised by long and varied institutional history, with different trajectories in their evolution. There is a complex system of relations between the institutions of the European Union and the authorities of the Member States, which are called as the European Administrative Space. This is a multidimensional concept, and it promotes intensive cooperation between administrative actors, and their activities from each level. The European Administrative Space is the area, in which increasingly integrated administrations jointly exercise power delegated to the EU in a system of shared sovereignty. This article explores the reasons for and the consequences of this development.

While climate change is often understood as a collective action and a market problem, we look at it as a problem of planning and coordination. Long-term planning is necessary to promote structural change, which will be required to keep the Paris Agreement's temperature goals. By encouraging states to develop a long-term climate strategy, the Paris Agreement invites countries to turn anticipatory governance into an international governance instrument. In this paper we explore how these strategies describe countries' climate plans and what the perceptions of government officials are about the potential for realization of these strategies. Using mixed methods, we explore both 1) planning dimensions (actions, actors and policies described in the strategies) by applying a topic modeling analysis to 50 documents; and 2) perceptions of the content and challenges to their realization among domestic policy professionals of four major emitters. Our results show that the strategies lack a detailed discussion on how decarbonization pathways could be materialized and who has the responsibility for implementation of long-term targets. Moreover, rather than being a steering instrument, the strategies are dominated by scenario planning and there is also a lack of attention to political issues. Taken together, we contend that strategies are limited in the way they present the future possibilities of low emissions development. To make them more effective in steering long-term decarbonization, greater attention needs to be placed on potential conflicts, barriers and stumbling blocks that may arise along the way. • Long-term climate planning has potential to shift the way we address climate change. • The language used in the strategies are dominated by technical terms and GHG emissions scenarios. • The strategies tend to reduce the political and social complexities of climate change. • As governance instruments, the strategies lack capacity to guide implementation and guidance on how to solve goal conflicts. • The strategies' main value is to provide a platform for alternative discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by methods used in risk assessment, this paper suggests a structured professional judgment approach (SPJ) to facilitate the decision-making process in expert group settings tasked with the development of narrative-based countering violent extremism (CVE) products. The added value of this concept is to systematically apply the relevant knowledge distributed among the literature and identify the strengths and weaknesses of the narrative-based CVE product in early stages like the baseline assessment. This may enable campaigners to avoid expensive mistakes and accelerate the development of products. A tentative checklist is provided. Furthermore, indicators for monitoring and evaluation are suggested.

In recent years, the pressure for educators to cultivate civic participation among Canada's apathetic youth voters has been mounting. Between 1998 and 2007, a national wave of curriculum reform introducing or enhancing civic engagement education occurred at the secondary level. In this study, we explore the role and place of civic engagement in the Canadian university curriculum. We have chosen to focus on curriculum in political science programs because calls to increase civic engagement originated with the goal of increasing participation in voting by young people, and because civic engagement is widely espoused as a central value in the discipline of political science. We report the findings of a national survey of politics instructors and their course syllabi regarding civic engagement as an intended learning outcome. Our analysis of the survey data involved a comparison of instructor responses with the assessment activities identified on their course syllabi. By analyzing the real and imagined audience(s) and purpose(s) of course assignments, we find that students are required to complete assignments that situate them within academic contexts involving academic purposes and audiences. The apparent conflict between civic education outcomes and academic assessment tasks relates to broader conversations about the purposes of political science education and higher education in general.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the [...]

Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic study of the 2016 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress (WCC), we analyze how Indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) rights advocates have used a rights-based approach (RBA) to advance long-standing struggles to secure local communities' land and resource rights and advance governing authority in biodiversity conservation. The RBA has allowed IPLC advocates to draw legitimacy from the United Nations system—from its declarations to its special rapporteurs—and to build transnational strategic alliances in ways they could not with participatory discourses. Using it, they have brought attention to biodiversity as a basic human right and to the struggle to use, access, and own it as a human rights struggle. In this article, we show how the 2016 WCC provided a platform for building and reinforcing these alliances, advancing diverse procedural and substantive rights, redefining key principles and standards for a rights-based conservation approach, and leveraging international support for enforcement mechanisms on-the-ground. We argue that, as advocates staked out physical and discursive space at the venue, they secured the authority to shape conservation politics, shifting the terrain of struggle between strict conservationists and community activists and creating new conditions of possibility for advancing the human rights agenda in international conservation politics. Nonetheless, while RBAs have been politically successful at reconfiguring global discourse, numerous obstacles remain in translating that progress to secure human rights to resources "on the ground", and it is vital that the international conservation community finance the implementation of RBA in specific locales, demand that nation states create monitoring and grievance systems, and decolonize the ways in which they interact with IPLCs. Finally, we reflect on the value of the Collaborative Event Ethnography methodology, with its emphasis on capturing the mundane, meaningful and processual aspects of policymaking, in illuminating the on-going labor entailed in bringing together and aligning the disparate elements in dynamic assemblages. Keywords: Human rights, global conservation governance, collaborative event ethnography, Indigenous peoples